Making Elgin A Better Place Is A Common Desire

Diversity Gives City A Solid Base To Face Future

May 20, 1998|By Jeffrey Steele. Special to the Tribune.

Wolff shares Helm's view that despite its size, Elgin still possesses many traits of a small, cohesive community. "Elgin is like 80,000 people, but I'm starting to learn how small that is," she says, laughing. "Even people from my grade school (days) are coming back to see me" at the cafe. Wolff is a lifelong Elgin resident.

Dating back to the days when Elgin truly was a small town, the community has always provided fertile soil to start and grow a business. Founded in 1835 by settlers from New York state, Elgin was a prime candidate for swift early growth because a straight line drawn from the booming metropolis of Chicago to the 19th Century lead mining center of Galena passed directly through the river town. Spurring industry in Elgin was the first rail line, which arrived in 1850, called the Galena & Chicago Union Railroad.

Early businesses included woolen mills, a grist mill, a saw mill and farm implement manufacturers, says Elizabeth Marston, museum director of the Elgin Area Historical Society. Elgin was also an early dairy center where butter and cheese were made. The city also became a center of condensed milk production.

But the business that put Elgin on the map was the Elgin National Watch Co., established in 1866. Expansion at the company kept the city's population climbing throughout the latter half of the 1800s. By the early 20th Century, about 20 percent of the city's residents worked there, Marston says. During World War II, the company made fuses for artillery and anti-aircraft weapons, as well as military watches.

"Women were allowed to work in the factory because of their small hands and manual dexterity," she says. As a result, many households enjoyed the luxury of two incomes, giving Elgin a higher standard of living than many cities of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The city's population, 25,000 at the turn of the century, climbed to about 55,000 by the end of World War II, Marston says. The large population and the absence of any comparably sized city nearby made Elgin's downtown a vibrant commerce center.

But trouble lay ahead. Elgin National Watch moved away in 1965, and the downtown area went into decline in the 1960s, Marston says.

Turning downtown's Grove Street into a pedestrian mall in 1974 failed to halt the slide, and the 1980 opening of the 96-acre Spring Hill Mall in neighboring West Dundee effectively signaled the area's demise as a shopping mecca.

Today, Elgin is on an upswing, both in terms of population and economic growth, Mayor Kevin Kelly says. The city's population as of an October 1996 special census was 85,068.

That includes a large and growing population of Laotian-Americans, says Kone Chansey, the community outreach coordinator for the Elgin Police Department, who is a liaison to the Laotian and other ethnic communities in the city.

Four percent of Elgin's population is Asian, and most of that population is Laotian, Chansey says. The influx of Laotians began in the mid-1970s, when a Communist regime took power in Laos.

"They came here because there were a lot of churches in Elgin that sponsored them and brought them to America," Chansey says.

Successive waves of Laotians who came to Elgin in the 1980s did so to be close to relatives and job opportunities. The earliest arrivals tended to work in factories because of language difficulties, but many second-generation Laotian-Americans have now taken professional positions in Elgin and nearby suburbs, Chansey says.

Part of the population growth has been due to the 300 new housing starts the city has averaged annually for three years. Much of that housing has been built on the city's west side, south of U.S. Highway 20 along the Randall Road corridor, Kelly says.

"It's primarily single-family tract homes," he says. "There is a town home element. But virtually every subdivision has a choice of ranch, raised ranch and two-story" home styles.

Prices for new single-family detached homes in the area range from $140,000 to $240,000, he adds. Townhouses cost $110,000 to $160,000.

A different kind of housing is becoming available downtown. Owners of two-story commercial buildings are developing their second stories into loft apartments, Kelly says. In addition, several former factory buildings have been or are being transformed into office space and loft condominiums, says Jim McConoughey, vice president of the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce.

The biggest downtown news in recent years was the October 1994 arrival of the Grand Victoria Casino, which produces the highest gross receipts and customer traffic of any riverboat in Illinois, city officials say.

"The casino has been a real asset to the Elgin community," Kelly says. "They're generating 11,000 visits a day to an area that wasn't visited a lot before that."